IFOSS L. Rev. Vol 2 Issue 1: Butterworths e-commerce and IT Law Handbook, 5th Edition by Daniel Hopkin

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Retailing at £125 and consisting entirely of legislation which is freely available online - for example at the UK OPSI's Statute Law Database1 and EUR-LEX2 - some might say this book is a waste of trees (whether it's printed on paper from sustainable sources isn't immediately clear). It has its uses, though. For example, there is currently no free way of obtaining access to consolidated versions of UK statutory instruments (SIs, a form of subordinate legislation). The OPSI Statute Law Database updates Acts of Parliament (eventually) but not SIs at present, which means that if you want to look at, say, the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 - a key piece of legislation for anyone selling goods or service online - you also have to look at the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) (Amendment) Regulations 2005, as well as two other SIs - or pay the subscription for an online service such as Westlaw or LexisNexis. The alternative is to buy this book. In 2,000 pages it covers about 170 separate pieces of legislation, plus things like the domain name dispute policies for .eu, ICANN and Nominet. It doesn't contain common free software licences, though. Adding a few of those would make this an even more useful book for the IT lawyer.

Licence and Attribution

This paper was published in the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, Volume 2, Issue 1 (June 2010). It originally appeared online at http://www.ifosslr.org.

This article should be cited as follows:

Hopkin, Daniel (2010) 'Butterworths e-commerce and IT Law Handbook, 5th Edition', IFOSS L. Rev., 2(1), pp 67 – 68
DOI: 10.5033/ifosslr.v2i1.33

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons UK (England and Wales) 2.0 licence, no derivative works, attribution, CC-BY-ND.

As a special exception, the author expressly permits faithful translations of the entire document into any language, provided that the resulting translation (which may include an attribution to the translator) is shared alike. This paragraph is part of the paper, and must be included when copying or translating the paper.